A Reply to Howard on the Press

I appreciate Howard's courteous reply. I hope it is clear that my rather tartly worded post is aimed not at Howard but at a particular group of press critics. For me, Nichols is not terribly important. (I think this is also how I would characterize his writing in general these days; I've admired some of his work but I think he's imbibed too much Internet fame and become too much the Atlantic contributor, both of which are intellectually harmful.) Rosen and Sullivan, on the other hand, are indeed, in my view, very bad press critics; they were bad even before Trump announced his first candidacy and, like many, got far worse after that.

I appreciate Howard's further elaborations in his post below. (And note the earlier post that elicited my sharp words about Rosen and Sullivan.) In attempting to think more specifically about his views, as opposed to those of the critics I was warning against, I imagine that, as is often the case, there are vast fields of agreement, and that identifying the precise points of disagreement is more valuable and difficult than anything that follows from that. 

As far as that goes, I also deplore inaccuracy and imbalance; who doesn't? But I do disagree with his add-on reference to inaccuracy and imbalance "in the name of objectivity." This, too, is a popular view and, lest there be any mistake about it, was oft-heard back when Howard and I were in journalism school. But I take the view that 1) if the word "objectivity" became a cliche in journalism-talk, "there is no such thing as objectivity" (a phrase Howard did not utter, to be clear) has long since attained the same status; and 2) for journalists, writing in the heat of the moment, often unburdened by knowledge and increasingly unaided by good editors, shooting for objectivity is much better than discarding it because it is incapable of perfect attainment. I'm happy to agree to disagree about this or, as I said, to figure out exactly where and how much we disagree. I would simply point readers to Marty Baron's arguments on this point (there is a critical response from Wesley Lowery, who I would put generally in Rosen and Sullivan's company) and a related argument from Kwame Anthony Appiah about neutrality. Of course, used this way "objectivity" becomes more of a placeholder for a set of institutional goals and practices, and I would be fine with it if we used the term "professionalism," or "kumquats" for that matter, instead. I do not think rejecting objectivity does a better job than shooting for it when it comes to avoiding "narratives," both because they're in the nature of the game in journalism and more broadly because we all engage in narrative framing all the time. Nor does it do a better job of avoiding partisan narratives in particular.

I don't think the press is especially or uniquely susceptible to narratives pushed by Republicans as opposed to narratives pushed by Democrats, a phenomenon which happens with equal frequency because both parties are lousy with professional narrative-pushers. We did not live through two weeks of repetitive commentary about childless cat ladies because the press was independently pursuing an issue without worrying about accusations of bias. The chances that the quote was unearthed and pushed by someone other than a Democratic opposition researcher asymptotically approach zero, and the press ate it up. The press did not go all in on Biden's age because it was buying into a Republican-concocted narrative. It did so because 1) there was an actual issue there, 2) it was a hell of a story, 3) the debate gave the press, which knew it had done less reporting on that issue than it should have until recently, the hook to write about it, at which point it compensated or overcompensated for its prior quietude, and 4) Democrats who wanted Biden out of the race then pushed the story hard, and pushback, also from Democrats, created the sense of conflict that generates news coverage. Republicans may have been gleeful spectators, but that's all they were. (The press should refocus on Trump's age and fitness. But one should remember in fairness that it ran a slew of those stories between 2019 and 2021, often more poorly sourced and speculative than the Biden age stories.) And they wrote about Trump showing grit in the moments after being shot not because Republicans encouraged them to do so but because it was also a hell of a story. (They wrote a lot of nonsense after that, but I think most of the nonsense was self-generated, as well as being drawn from the press's current, poisonous, bottomless well of a reporting resource: Twitter.)

I also do not think that the approach pushed by critics of the old-fashioned press approach makes for more accuracy. I anything, I think it is even more likely to result in blatant partiality. (For some, the idea is that at least the partiality will be more visible in the reporting. Whether that's so or not, my concern is that the reporting will simply be worse--that it will result in some stories being poorly done and others being missed altogether.)  

Finally, I see no evidence that the press's move, both a conscious one and a symptom of generational change, away from "objectivity" and toward something else after 2016, encouraged by folks such as Lowery, had much effect at all on the Trump presidency, the 2020 election, public opinion, or anything else. And in the long run, I doubt that the current sweetheart coverage it is now giving Harris, or the later negative narratives it will run with for some period of time as it overcompensates for its current puffery, or the more critical reporting it will devote to Trump and Vance to please subscribers (it turns out that big corporate advertisers did more to benefit journalism than to harm it; the subscriber model will kill journalism in the act of trying to save it) and out of "fear of accusations of bias," will have much effect either. The press, like the president who was at a standstill in the polls and leaking support in every direction, has done plenty of pushing of the "accurate Democratic argument that Trump is an authoritarian who undermines and threatens the constitutional order" between 2016 and today. I tend to find many of the facts underlying that argument--although we should use the correct label: it's not an argument; it is, in fact, another narrative--largely accurate and newsworthy and therefore worthy of reporting. But simply trumpeting it, as critics like Sullivan thought and think we should at every opportunity, turns out to be an essentially empty exercise if the assumption is that simply repeating the phrase frequently will somehow change things. When Trump, or any candidate or public official, lies, the press should report that fact clearly. When he says something authoritarian, the press should likewise report it. But the idea that it makes a difference, to either change in the world or better journalism, whether its headline uses the word "authoritarian" or not, is a fallacy. Again, this is not what Howard wrote. But I think it's a fair characterization of what Rosen and Sullivan believe. I think they genuinely believe that putting the word in the headline will ward off authoritarianism, and that every time they are proved wrong they take this as evidence that the press should put the word in the headline even more often. In their Escher-like views and enthusiasm, they are impervious to refutation. 

And, perhaps somewhat contra Howard, I think that belief, and the associated belief that the press must adopt a new approach, does indeed lead not to more accurate reporting but to ignoring or suppressing genuine news--it encourages "not reporting" as well as "accurately reporting." The press did adopt a new approach after 2016--not to the extent that Rosen or Sullivan wanted, and certainly not as much as Democratic operatives wanted, but the changes, and the pressure to do so from within and without, were obvious. The result was some missed or underplayed stories, some unforced errors, a momentary increase in subscribers, and nothing else. It turns out that the way to fight authoritarianism is to get out there and fight authoritarians in one's capacity as a citizen, not to change journalism (or art, or academic writing, or any other specialized, professional, or avocational activity). 

Of course all of these things can be debated and much of the debate will turn on perspective. People who mistakenly think the press is, more or less literally, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party will evaluate the evidence one way, and people who think (rather incredibly) that Maggie Haberman personally loves Donald Trump will evaluate it another way. I suspect, but not with complete certainty, that my disagreement with Howard can be put down to three things. 1) I think the critics he cites are awful. 2) I think we have different views of the role and value of "objectivity" in professional journalism. 3) I think we probably have different views about whether an "emergency" is a sound reason for changing fundamental practices in journalism or not. I may be wrong. And even if I'm right that leaves a lot of room for agreement on particular issues, as well as disagreement about how to characterize particular moves on the part of the press. But I think that's the core of where we part ways. 

I should add that I think Howard's views are more popular than mine, and in many cases more popular within the press itself. I just think they are wrong, if not in every particular then in the general tendency. Our main social and political crisis is an institutional crisis. It does not demand wholesale change to, or abandonment of, those institutions. It demands a firm re-commitment to them, and to their standard practices. Although I see this as demand as requiring activity and energy, my position may also seem to put me on the side of staidness, conventionality, and quietism. I'm pretty content with that. In my view, the changes we have seen in the profession in the past few years, that a new generation of "journalists" (many of whom do more commentary than actual reporting) have demanded, and that critics like Rosen and Sullivan and others are urging, will do little to combat authoritarianism. I fear that instead, those changes will ultimately result in a further drop in public trust in journalism, a decrease in the quality of the work done by that institution, and the further and perhaps final financial collapse of the institutional press. I doubt all my fears will be realized. But I think the best way to forestall those eventualities is for the press to refocus on doing its job in a fairly conventional, old-fashioned, and admittedly imperfect and aspirational way.